Hiding the “unsubscribe” button? Drop that growth hacking guide.

I didn’t care about any other statistics — and I definitely didn’t watch vanity metrics like weekly growth rates and website visits.

Obviously, new signups are a good thing. Attracting more subscribers means we’re on the right track with our product. It also keeps us profitable.

Measuring total active users is even more important. Those numbers show whether or not people are logging in and creating web forms.

If you’re focused on short-term cash, it would be easy to say, “who cares if they’re actually using the product?”

After all, a paying customer is a paying customer. A gym still makes money if well-meaning people buy memberships but never hit the treadmill. A magazine doesn’t know if subscribers read past the front cover.

User engagement is the wrinkle in this argument — and it’s not just a feel-good policy.

JotForm now has 3.2 million users, but it took us 12 years to get here. We’ve never had any outside funding — and if we’d gone deep into growth hacking, vanity metrics and tiny optimizations, I believe we’d still be spinning our startup wheels.